These Are the 25 Toughest Animals on Earth

The good news about the deathstalker, which skitters around the deserts of the Middle East flexing its vicious little pinchers, is that its name is mostly marketing. Sure, the Deathstalker's sting is the worst of any scorpion on Earth, but it very unlikely to kill you. The bad news is that a Deathstalker sting is still going to hurt—a lot. Does that mean people do the sensible thing and avoid these green and yellow varmints, which can reach 4 inches in length? Nope. Oddly enough, many people actually keep Deathstalkers as pets.

Here's an animal that wouldn't stand a chance against much of this list on flat ground, or even in your typical mountain environment. But just try to hunt a mountain goat on the highest, rockiest peaks and see how well that goes. These are the world's best rock climbers and thus some truly elusive prey. Their cloven hoofs have a padded bottom to grip on snow, ice, and especially rock faces, even ones that appear to be impossible to climb. Mountain goats (which, by the way, are actually more closely related to antelopes than goats) can jump 12 feet and are acclimated to both high-altitude and low temperatures. They also have cool beards.

Really, any one of the many poisonous snake varieties could have cracked this list, since they're all capable of killing large animals (like, for instance, us humans). But we're going with the Black mamba, so called for the color of its mouth, which just seems evil. The mamba is fast on land and in trees and has one of the most toxic venoms on the planet. If one bites you, you're likely to lose consciousness within an hour. Without anti-venom to counteract the powerful neurotoxin, you've got at most 15 hours to live. The best of luck to you.

This New Zealand bug looks like a prehistoric grasshopper and is one of the world's largest insects; a particularly huge variant was found to weigh more than a sparrow. Wetas aren't particularly aggressive, though they will bite and scratch with their spikey legs if threatened. But that's not what makes them so tough. No, what makes the weta such a formidable animal is that it's like something out of a sci-fi novel: One variety has evolved an ability to go into suspended animation. The so-called Mountain Stone Weta can be frozen in ice for several months and then just resume regular life when it thaws, as if nothing happened. How? Well, because of a protein that prevents the formation of ice crystals in its blood-like fluid.

Camels live in withering, dry environments in which virtually nothing else can survive and are actually quite comfortable in them. A camel is untroubled by 110 degree temperatures, even when carrying 200 pounds or more on its back, and can go up to 8 days without water and a month or more without food. Because of that, a camel's urine is the consistency of syrup and Bedouins don't even have to dry the feces in order to burn them for fuel. Camels are so well adapted to heat and lack of hydration that they can drop 40 percent of their body weight without serious consequences.

"King of the jungle" is a terrible nickname for a cat that doesn't actually live anywhere near the jungle. The lion's primary habitat is the grassy savannahs of Sub-Saharan Africa—at least the "king" point makes some sense. Lions are the unchallenged apex predators of the continent, and are particularly effective hunters because they work in packs, sneaking up on and then ambushing antelopes, zebras, warthogs—pretty much anything on four legs that isn't an elephant, rhino, or hippo, and that includes cheetahs, leopards, and hyenas, which lions will kill to eliminate competition. Fortunately for most of the things that lions like to eat, these cats are lazy. They prefer napping to just about anything, sleeping up to 20 hours a day, and get up to half of their diet by scavenging carrion.

What's most interesting about these insane looking birds—the world's largest eagle, by weight—is that the females, which can reach 22 pounds, weigh almost twice as much as the males. Harpy's natural habitat stretches from Mexico down into Argentina and unlike the esteemed bald eagle—which looks great on a motorcycle jacket but is actually rather work-shy, preferring to scavenge for lunch—harpy eagles are relentless hunters, and particularly enjoy killing and eating sloths and monkeys. When those animals aren't on the menu, harpy eagles will hunt small deer, but since those are too heavy to fly with, they have to tear them into pieces first. That's pretty tough.

Siberian and Bengal tigers are more or less the same size, between 350 and 700 pounds, but the Siberian wins out for living in a harsher climate. These cats are canny hunters, and will patrol huge territories spanning hundreds of miles through a variety of terrain in order to find prey. Like all big cats, tigers prefer ungulates (various deer species, as well as caribou and moose), but when food is scarce, Siberian tigers are opportunistic and brave. They can and do hunt both black and brown bears, which is pretty much reason alone to put them on this list.

The case here is simple: the dung beetle is the strongest animal on earth compared to its body weight. Dung beetles, which live all over the world, regularly push balls of fresh animal poop that weigh more than 200 times their body weight, and researchers have documented one individual pushing a ball that was 1,141 times his body weight. To put it in terms you might understand, that's like a 150 pound person moving 80 tons. They're also tiny astronomers. Scientists observing beetle behavior in South Africa now think these little poo rollers find their way back and forth to nest by using the Milky Way to navigate.

Being one of our closest living animal relatives, the gorilla, (which is largest of the four so-called "great apes") possesses a formidable mix of strength and smarts. These are very social animals, with large families, sophisticated systems of communication, and an ability to make and use tools. None of which makes them tough, only formidable. What's tough is that gorillas are the bodybuilders of the animal kingdom. Science can't seem to agree on the precise number — for one thing, it's a hard metric to measure — but an adult silverback is at least 6 times and perhaps as much as 20 times stronger than a human.

Neither a tarantula nor a hawk, this giant flying insect is actually a wasp that hunts spiders. If that last phrase didn't terrify you, consider this: the tarantula hawk is one of two insects to score a 4 the "Schmidt sting pain index," developed by entomologist Justin Schmidt to measure the severity of bug bites on a scale of 1 to 4. Here's what a biologist told Wired about some advice he'd read on how to treat a sting. "Their recommendation—and this was actually in a peer-reviewed journal—was to just lie down and start screaming, because few if any people could maintain verbal and physical coordination after getting stung by one of these things. You're likely to just run off and hurt yourself. So just lie down and start yelling."

The planet's third largest feline, after the tiger and lion, the jaguar (aka panther) is South and Central America's most capable hunter. Jaguars are solitary animals, and hunt via stealth, surprising prey and then overcoming whatever's being stalked with a rare mix of speed and power. Jaguars have the greatest bite force of any large cat, the strength to pull a 500-pound deer up into a tree while climbing, and are excellent swimmers. Black jaguars, by the way, are the same species—the lack of markings is due to a mutation that occurs in approximately 6 percent of the wild population.

There are five types of rhinos, three in Africa and two in Asia, and all of them are tough. Rhinos weigh at least 2,000 and sometimes as much as 4,000 pounds, have a thick almost armored skin, and a large horn that's capable of goring any animal that makes the unwise decision of mounting an attack. For those reasons, adult rhinos have no real natural predators—except, sadly, humans. Due to demand for those horns in Asia, rhinos are among the most endangered animals on earth, with the African varieties vanishing at an especially rapid rate, and if we can't solve the problem fast, they won't be around to make this list in a decade.

Technically, crocodiles are aquatic animals, and thus ineligible for our list, but they spend a good chunk of time on land—and often prey on land animals—so that's plenty good enough for us (after all this entire list is purely subjective). Whether they're tough is unquestionable. Saltwater crocs are the largest living predator on land and in non-ocean environments, growing up to 17 feet and 2,000 pounds, and possessing the most powerful bite ever measured in a laboratory—strong enough to crush a cow's skull in one chomp. Being huge and aggressive and native to places with large, crowded human environments (like India, China, Bangladesh and Malaysia), saltwater crocodiles will sometimes target people as prey, though the number of actual deaths per year is still very low.

If this were a list of adorable things that you should actually be terrified of, hippos would probably be number one. Not because hippos are innately angry or aggressive—though they can be both—but because they kill more humans in Africa than any other animal. Why? Because they're huge and unpredictable, and like to sit submerged in the same rivers that people fish, bathe, and play in. Male hippos can be territorial, while females will raise hell to protect their young, but often hippos wreak havoc by accident, by surfacing under boats, knocking people overboard, and creating a panic that can turn ugly when a 3,000-pound animal with 20-inch teeth that moves well in water and can run up to 20 miles-per-hour is suddenly freaked out. Hippopotamus, by the way, is Greek for "river horse," which makes absolutely no sense.

This is the closest thing we have to a dinosaur—a gigantic lizard (the world's largest) with armored scales that roams certain islands of the Indonesian archipelago, hunting anything it can catch and bite with huge, bacteria-laced teeth. Komodo dragons grow up to 10-feet-long and 150 pounds, giving them free reign of these islands, with no predators except for humans, who have historically killed dragons because they feared them—to be fair, komodo dragons have killed humans on numerous occasions. A komodo's mouth is rife with bacteria, so its bite can be septic, and the dragons will eat up to 80 percent of their own bodyweight in a single meal, then regurgitate all of the indigestible parts (bone, hair, feathers, scales) in a foul-smelling "gastric pellet."

Being the world's largest carnivorous marsupial is more specific than impressive, but the devil—an ugly-cute animal that lives only on the Australian island of Tasmania — does have some legitimate bragging rights. According to a study, the devil has the strongest bite on earth of any carnivore, when adjusted for size. Devils weigh about 20 pounds on average but can exert up to 94 pounds of pressure, for a "Bite Force Quotient" of 181, which is nearly twice as strong as a hyena and some 60 points higher than a lion. It's enough to crush bone and even bite through metal traps. According to National Geographic, the Loony Toons character inspired by the Tasmanian devil is not that much of an exaggeration. The animal, Nat Geo says, "has a notoriously cantankerous disposition and will fly into a maniacal rage when threatened by a predator, fighting for a mate, or defending a meal."

There's a reason the Cape buffalo (aka African buffalo) has never been domesticated. It's a mean, unpredictable animal, unafraid of confrontation and responsible for as many as 200 human deaths a year in Africa. Hunters prize the buffalo as one of Africa's "Big Five" but also fear it more than most any other animal, because having bad aim can make for an interesting afternoon. A wounded buffalo often runs toward and not away from its attacker.